Government-Environmental Protection
From WikiDemocracy
Wilderness Forever: The Wilderness Act 50th Anniversary
To celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Wilderness Act, the Sierra Club and the Smithsonian collaborated on a short film primer at the entrance to The Smithsonian Institution Museum’s Wilderness Forever exhibit opening Sept. 3rd
6 Good Things Richard Nixon Did for the Environment
by Shea Gunther 14/8/24 Treehugger
When most people think of President Richard Nixon, the term "environmentalist" isn't the word that immediately leaps to mind. The 37th president, who resigned from office in 1973 after the Watergate scandal, left a surprisingly strong environmental legacy, giving our nation new legislation governing protection of the air, water and wilderness.
Theodore Roosevelt
Despite his unabashed taste for hunting, Theodore Roosevelt was undeniably a lover of nature, and perhaps our first environmentalist president. Throughout his presidency, Roosevelt used executive action like no other president before him to reach his conservationist goals. Roosevelt ensured that Yellowstone National Park could not be exploited for commercial goals and established over 50 national bird refuges through executive action. He would go on to found the U.S. Forest Service and create the
first 18 National Monuments, including Muir Woods, Grand Canyon, and Devils Tower.
Is Environmental Protection Possible?
by Evaggelos Vallianatos 23/8/19 COUNTERPUNCH
I joined the US Environmental Protection Agency in 1979. It happened by accident. A friend in Alexandria, Virginia, was working for the personnel office of EPA. We talked and I expressed interest in EPA. I said to him something to the effect the EPA was a great and necessary institution in late twentieth century America. You could not hide from pollution. Millions of cars harmed our health and defiled the atmosphere daily.
How America solved its first air pollution crisis — and why solving the next one will be harder
The history of American air pollution, explained.
EPA Would Shrink to 1970 Staffing Levels—‘When the Skies Were Dark With Smog’—Under Proposed Plan
by Marianne Lavelle 26/2/25 Inside Climate News
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency would slash 65 percent of its workforce under plans that its administrator, Lee Zeldin, has discussed with the White House, President Donald Trump said Wednesday at his first cabinet meeting.
The lost history of what Americans knew about climate change in the 1960s
In 2007, when the court ruled that the Clean Air Act of 1970 gave the Environmental Protection Agency the flexibility to regulate carbon dioxide emissions, former Justice John Paul Stevens wrote, “When Congress enacted these provisions, the study of climate change was in its infancy.” Writing a dissent in a 2022 case looking at similar questions, Justice Elena Kagan argued that back in 1970 when Congress created the act, legislators gave the EPA the flexibility to keep up with the times, tackling problems (i.e., climate change) that couldn’t be anticipated.
A look at EPA administrators since the agency’s founding
by Jonathan Hiskes & Sara Barz 20/12/08 Grist
As government titles go, “administrator” doesn’t have the same ring as “secretary,” “czar,” or “ambassador.” But it’s an accurate moniker for the top job at the Environmental Protection Agency, where the president’s appointee is charged with running an agency of 17,000 employees organized around 10 regional offices, with an overall annual budget of more than $7 billion.
This landmark law saved millions of lives and trillions of dollars
by Beth Gardiner 29/12/20 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC
Fifty years ago, a group of Democratic and Republican senators spent months working together in Washington, D.C. to tackle a danger they all agreed was harming Americans’ health and lives. Huddled in committee rooms for hours on end, they listened to one another’s ideas, traded jokes across party lines and, in the end, produced a bill that won unanimous Senate approval and passed the House of Representatives with just one “no” vote.
